Penny and Bruce Go Walkabout: A Street Like Any Other, A House Like No Other

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A Street Like Any Other, A House Like No Other

Peñalolén—Avenida José Arrieta 8401, Santiago, Chile. Villa Grimaldi, now named the Park of Peace.

It was not a park of peace for the thousands of political prisoners who were taken there and tortured during the military dictatorship in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. More than two hundred are known to have been executed there.

Note the neighbors' houses behind the wall.

The Chilean Army took over this large house and enclosed grounds, and its special intelligence unit DINA used Villa Grimaldi as a torture and detention center for several years. Before leaving, they destroyed the main house which had been converted to a cell block. The cell locations are now marked with brick outlines, and a single tree grows in each one. A great deal of information about Villa Grimaldi, DINA, and Operation Condor is available on the web, and so I won’t go into that here.

Carmen Bueno was executed here.

Who was Claudia Valenzuela? I don’t know. She is not here to tell us.

How does a horror like this get started? I am sure that is a complex question, but I believe that one pre-condition is usually there: An organization with power that believes it is the repository of national honor, pride, and identity. One that believes that those who disagree with their point of view are outright traitors to their country. Read Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here.

Avenida José Arrieta—a street like any other. Villa Grimaldi—a house like no other. I wish that second part were true. As many as 10,000 Chileans disappeared at the hands of their armed forces and their police during the dictatorship, and in Argentina, that number is 30,000. Some claim that those figures are exaggerated.

But it doesn’t really matter, because one single victim is too many. And there were many Villa Grimaldis, here and elsewhere. Still are.

Itinerary

Blogs are in reverse order, so you see the end first. Since this blog is fairly large, here are the dates to find entries from different places: Eastern United States, September-November 2010; Santiago de Chile December 2010-January 2011: Antarctica February 2011; Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, February-April 2011; California April 2011; Ireland May 2011; Scotland and Netherlands June 2011; Paris, July-August 2011, Central Europe and Strasbourg September-October 2011; New York, November 2011, California December 2011-January 2012

Welcome and Bienvenidos!

In 2010, Penny and I were in Lima. We decided then to give up the lease on our San Francisco home when it expired that summer. Figuring that we were spending too much money for four years renting a house from which we were gone half the time traveling, we would get a smaller place. That idea worked its way down to a storage unit, and we decided to go live in places that we had visited before and liked.

Some of my friends contend that I should write and publish a travel book. Perhaps. In the meantime, this blog will have to do.

pennyandbruceroundworld2008.blogspot.com

pennyandbruceroundworld2008.blogspot.com/

If you want to see the journal of our trip around the world in 2008, done almost without airplanes (one flight of about an hour became unavoidable) then click on the above link.